Here Are Some Of America's Most Privacy Friendly Companies

Recently I asked some leading privacy advocates for suggestions of companies they see as especially privacy friendly. It turns out it is rather difficult to define exactly what such a firm might look like. My simple definition would be a company that is transparent about what personal data it collects and what it does with such data. The firm should also give customers a real choice in how the data is used.

Experts say it is hard to evaluate which companies are best in respecting customers' privacy. (Photo by Adam Tanner)

Other criteria might be whether companies have suffered data breaches (the topic of a recent article), or whether they sell your info to others. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy rights group, publishes an annual list of companies that protect data from the government. It’s “hard to know who is good, unless they make really strong promises about their data practices,” said Lee Tien, the senior staff attorney at EFF. “We and other privacy advocates typically have no window into what they actually do unless they do something bad.”

Tien broke down companies into various categories to highlight some he thought were relatively good. In software, he cited Microsoft, which has tried to distinguish itself of recent as privacy friendly. In online services he mentioned Google, Tumblr and Facebook. Many would passionately disagree about Facebook and Google, and those two companies in particular ignite emotional debate related to privacy issues. Among ISPs and carriers Tien listed Credo, Sonic, and Comcast.

Chris Hoofnagle, director of Information Privacy Programs at the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, singled out an entirely different set of firms. “I think you'll find that the companies that perform the best on that are B2B services, such as Salesforce, which explicitly says that the data you load into their service is yours, that you can encrypt it (so Salesforce cannot read it), and that they will never sell it,” he said. “App.net is probably in that category. It's basically only going to be for-pay services.”

“In financial services, Amex and Discover are the best for payments, Square is also good, and non-profit banks such as USAA have good practices.”

Sarah Downey, a lawyer at Boston privacy company Abine, is one of several to cite Twitter as a model company when it comes to privacy. She says they have implemented a “Do Not Track” policy in a meaningful way, have simple privacy settings, publish a good transparency report and have fought for users' rights in court. She also put Mozilla, best known for their Firefox browser,at the top of her list for advocating stronger privacy in the face of extremely aggressive advertiser backlash.

A number of experts mentioned companies that offer privacy products such as search engine DuckDuckGo (which does not track searches) or email service Silent Circle. But singling out companies built around privacy is an unfair contest because that is the very reason they exist. Likewise, if we were looking at environmentally friendly companies, I would rather identify big companies that have embraced model standards in their industries rather than small manufacturers of solar energy panels, for example.

There are certainly many businesses that are privacy friendly because they just do not deal much with personal data. “I'm sure there are lots of toothpick manufacturers who don't even have much customer data, or lots of small businesses that don't do much with what they have,” says Tien.

Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University and subject of a recent profile, has a particular favorite privacy friendly example: “The farmer at the local green market, who only takes cash and has no video surveillance rig spying on his customers.”

In the end, what constitutes a privacy friendly company may lie largely in the eye of the beholder. Companies certainly could do a lot more to highlight their practices in easy language. A step in that direction would be nutrition-style labels highlighting the content of privacy policies. On food labels, different people look out for different things, whether fat content, sugar, sodium or fiber. On privacy labels, consumers could focus on areas of most interest to them, whether it was how companies share data with others, or their Internet tracking, or how strongly they resist government efforts to obtain data from them.

As consumers grow more aware of how companies gather extensive amounts of personal data, many will begin to pay more attention to those which are more privacy friendly. Companies which clearly disclose their practices and give consumers a choice may ultimately gain a market advantage.